exposing light notes I

Next week my focus is only on photography. I will be visiting a Professional Imaging event, the exhibition 60 year Magnum and I have a ticket for a debate on reportage photography. In Stedelijk Museum I hope to see photo’s of one of my favorite Magnum photographers : Raghu Rai. Yes, I am ‘bias’, because his work is about India and I find India very special. To end the week, I will meet up with an ‘old’ colleague. We fixed some study/studio days and we will work together for the first time in his studio.

Komende week is mijn focus uitsluitend gericht op de fotografie. Op mijn programma staan : vakbeurs, tentoonstelling 60 jaar Magnum en het debat reportagefotografie dat gaat plaatsvinden op 5 maart. Ik hoop in het Stedelijk foto’s van Raghu Rai te zien, want daar heb ik zwak voor. Ja, ik heb ook een zwak voor India. Om de week af te sluiten, heb ik afgesproken met een ‘oude’ collega. We hebben een aantal studie/studiodagen vastgelegd en gaan voor het eerst tesamen aan de slag in zijn studio.

The 4^th Triennial of Photography offers its visitors an extensive and varied program ranging from portfolio viewings and round table talks to nightly lightshows, lectures, and workshops.
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Drawn by the light: Making salted paper prints
Martin Jürgens, photograph conservator, Hamburg, offers a workshop on the production of calotypes (negative and positive prints of the salted paper process). 19th and 20th April 2008.

Photographic Series
A Photographic Workshop by Valerie Wagner at the Museum for Arts and Crafts (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe). 30th April – 22nd May 2008 (4 days).

How to curate an exhibition. Project Management for Photographers: How to Prepare and Organize an Exhibition. A workshop by Valérie Wagner, photo artist. 18th – 20th April at the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe).

The second weekend offers portfolio viewings with experts of international photo festivals as well as art directors and art dealers. The portfolio viewing adresses both professional photographers and future talents.

Nightly “Flashlights”, workshops with photographers and photo restorers as well as round table talks with guests from museums, publishing houses, and last but not least the photographers themselves round off the program.

More on the website

Updated on 9 May 2008

My new project is about managing a photo collection.

I went on a three day course “managing photo collections (cultural heritage) ” to learn how to structure, manage and share a photo collection. I will have to work with material that was collected in 21 years that currently lies in boxes, sits in albums and is stored in electronic folders on drives. All unsorted and untagged.

My first lesson was interesting and fun, also because it was an on-site lesson at ICM where I happen to meet one of my first photography teachers, Frido Troost. He’s an art historian and now an antiquarian and he told us about the principle of historic -chemical – photographic processes and taught us how to recognize the various old photo types. (In “my” collection non of the older types…).

• The Daguerreotype. Source : The Getty. “The daguerreotype is a one-of-a-kind, highly detailed photographic image on a polished copper plate coated with silver. It was the first popular photographic medium and enjoyed great success when it was introduced in 1839. Although primarily a nineteenth-century medium involving a painstaking process, daguerreotypy is still practiced today by an active — and avid — group of devotees”. See the video : Early Photography : Making Daguerreotypes

FAQ daguerreotypes

• The Albumen process and the Collodion process. Source : The Getty. “Invented in 1851, the wet collodion photographic process produced a glass negative and a beautifully detailed print. Preferred for the quality of the prints and the ease with which they could be reproduced, the new method thrived from the 1850s until about 1880″. See the video : Photography: The Wet Collodion Process

Collodion process by Sally Mann

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Felix Nadar (1910) selfportrait

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• The Tintype

The New York Times, 20 April 2008 | You Bet Your Tintype, Buckaroo

“Making these kinds of pictures, you don’t need the mental skills that you have to have a Ph.D. for,” he said. “It’s more like learning to be a carpenter. It’s work and it’s satisfying. What you get is unique, not mass-produced. You can’t repeat the process. So it’s the antithesis of digital.”

Audio slideshow – tintype master (2006)

• The Silver-gelatin print : V&A | Exploring Photography : Photographic Processes : Gelatin-silver print

The Getty : Research on the conservation of photographs – Project video : the first photograph

The second lesson was about conservation (Mattie Boom, Rijksmuseum), copyright restrictions and permissions (Cecile van der Harten, Rijksmuseum).

Slideshow | Kunst op papier / art on paper

The third lesson ( Martijn van der Kaaij) dealt with digital access, digitizing, meta data and databases, search of a collection and project management.

Obviously I am not handling a museum collection and there will be no need to spend enormous resources on the project. But it will be a project that takes time and money.

The first step for me is to make an inventory of the photos and negatives. The second step is to team up with ICT and to draft a proposal.

Recommended reading : The Getty : Introduction to Imaging

IPTC Photo Metadata White Paper 2007

Video in English, French and Dutch about digitising collections

The Getty : Image Bank

More links on my ‘resources page’.

From the BBC serie : Genius of photography. Part one, fixing the shadows : about the history of photography. Fascinating viewing camera obscura, daguerreotype, carte de visite and tintype etc.

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Introduction to the Semantic Web
beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl/

research.imagesforthefuture.org/

On 28 January I was one of ten photographers that had an inspiring day with a Dutch master of portrait photography.

Koos Breukel photographed me and I photographed two fellow photographers, with my own digital camera.

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The camera begins to lie : Vanity Fair’s exhibition reveals the subtle changing relationship between photographer and subject
Source : Guardian.co.uk

Pictures inside the show

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008 is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from February 14 to May 26, and at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, from June 14 to September 21.